Kerry prepares to turn up the volume
As kickoff nears, he aims to draw Democrats' notice
By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff, 8/31/2003
Senator John F. Kerry this week moves into the critical period in a yearlong quest: the put-up-or-shut-up phase of his presidential campaign.
The Massachusetts Democrat today makes a Sunday talk show appearance that he hopes will catch the eye of the elite opinion makers and the upper echelon of the Democratic establishment. He hopes to convince them that he is the only one of the party's nine nomination candidates with a sincere chance of unseating President Bush, who will net an expected $200 million in Republican reelection contributions.
Ceremonial speeches announcing Kerry's candidacy Tuesday and Wednesday in South Carolina, Iowa, and New Hampshire are aimed at the large majority of voters that to date, polls find, are having a hard time naming most of the Democratic candidates.
The first speech will be heavy on the 59-year-old's biography, focusing on military service in Vietnam and his long political career, while the rest are intended to outline his vision for the country, especially with regard to reviving the economy.
And a rally Wednesday night in Boston, as well as a Thursday launch of television advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire, will signal Kerry's effort to invigorate his base at home and begin to compete head-to-head for primary voters with rivals such as Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. Dean started advertising in Iowa in June and is now airing ads in nine states.
Two recent public opinion surveys in their shared neighbor of New Hampshire showed Dean leading Kerry -- in one instance by 21 points.
The traditional Labor Day kickoff to presidential campaigning ends a preliminary phase of team building, fund-raising, and campaigning for the Kerry team. In an interview yesterday, the senator said he is confident that his campaign will catch on. His aides said they would rather be the front-runner in January, when the voting starts, than September, when the public is just beginning to tune into the presidential campaign.
"I think people are now going to focus on who can be their president and who can address their concerns going forward," Kerry said from Washington, where a fourth draft of his announcement speech was circulating through his campaign ranks. "Four months [before the kickoff Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary] is several lifetimes in politics. There's still a long way to go in this campaign."
Kerry said he was not fazed by Dean's recent surge, explaining: "I know why I'm doing this, I know what I want to achieve, and I know what the challenge is. I like the challenge."
A fellow Massachusetts Democrat who has been in Kerry's place, former governor Michael S. Dukakis, said the candidate is well-positioned.
"I don't know how many times I said this in 1988, but this thing is a marathon, it's a long-distance run," said Dukakis, who won the party's 1988 nomination but lost in the general election to Bush's father, George H. W. Bush. "I like all the signs I'm seeing: his message is getting more focused, he settling into the role. And clearly he's a guy they don't want to run against in the White House."
Striking a chord increasingly prevalent within the Kerry organization itself, Dukakis also played down the importance of winning in Iowa and New Hampshire, saying that while strong showings are vital, a successful presidential candidate must have the durability to continue competing in subsequent primaries and caucuses.
"I think he's going to have a successful effort over a sustained period of time. That's why I think he's going to win the nomination," Dukakis said.
Kerry was pronounced the front-runner by some media organizations as early as January, a label the senator publicly dismissed but used to his advantage in hiring aides, landing prominent fund-raisers, and establishing his field organizations in Iowa and New Hampshire. Surgery in February for prostate cancer broke some of the momentum, just as Dean's opposition to the impending war in Iraq catapulted him to attention among the Democratic Party's vocal antiwar constituency. While Kerry placed a steady second in terms of campaign fund-raising in the first and second quarters of the year, Dean, who was near the bottom of the field at the beginning, stunned the Democratic establishment by topping the field in the three-month period that ended June 30. His successful use of the Internet prompted his rivals -- Kerry included -- to broaden their traditional fund-raising campaigns. The senator also copied Dean by adding a web log to his campaign site and by trying to organize nationally through the Meetup.com website.
Kerry led Dean for six consecutive months in New Hampshire in polls taken by the American Research Group Inc., but its August survey found Dean pulling ahead of Kerry 28 percent to 21 percent, a gain the pollster attributed to Dean's ad campaign. Last Monday, a more recent poll gave Dean an even more resounding margin in New Hampshire, a 21-point lead over Kerry.
Last week, the senator dismissed the findings, saying he had seen other polls with different results, but over the weekend, an aide e-mailed reporters a section of pollster John Zogby's analysis of his survey. Highlighted in bold was a paragraph reading: "For Dean, these results suggest that while a greater percentage of likely Democratic primary voters may prefer his candidacy to the others, they remain unsure how strongly committed they are to his candidacy."
Kerry hopes to begin to reverse the recent trend with an appearance this morning on NBC's "Meet the Press" and his announcement tour. Jim Jordan, Kerry's campaign manager, refused to offer details about the advertising campaign, but its Thursday launch will coincide with a debate in New Mexico, the first among the candidates in a forum sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee.
Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.
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